Muir StreetBy Spencer Anderson

Part 3

After many ideas having been bandied about regarding the storage areas of the layout including a turntable capable of holding 12 locos, my work colleague came up with the suggestion of basically reversing this idea, and having the equivalent of a roundhouse style set up, which with some experimentation is proving to be the final solution.

This means that all boards will now be rectangular and all will be flush at the front of the layout - the storage boards being 3ft x 2ft. The scenic boards will follow the curve of the track on the front face..

Storage lines are also included under the tenements as shown in the track plan and in total around 20 locos can be stored - this should be more than enough for operation at an exhibition.

A Dapol turntable has been bought and built to see how it would suit the layout. It looks fine so another one is on order. The turntables will be manually operated with wipers soldered to the under side of the tracks for continuity and some sort of locating mechanism will be devised in due course.

Part 2

Since the last time I wrote about Muir Street things have slowly progressed. Joe came up with the idea of including a crossoverwhich is shown in the track plan and will add more interest to the operation of the layout. The original idea of having a cassette system on the storage boards has been abandoned in favour of sector plates approximately 2ft long mounted on drawer runners. This system was used very successfully on Helenston and is also being incorporated into Eaglesham. There will be turntables at the ends of the sector plates. I have as yet not decided which model will be used and whether they will be manually or electrically operated. I am considering using SMP finescale track with handbuilt points (well, Bill built!).

The group attended Model Rail Scotland recently where purchases were made for the start of the foot bridges and a visit to thebridge at Motherwell on which these will be based is being planned. Although the bridge has been modernised photographs and measurements will be taken for reference. I have a number of photographs of the bridge in the 1960's and these will also be used to help in the construction of the models.

Working in a packaging company allows me access to the tools required to build a full size cardboard mock up which is shown in the photos above. The original idea was to model the front of the tenament with a road but due to the dictating width of 18 inches it was decided to model the rear of the buildings. There will be baseboards at each end of the layout to hold locos in some sort of cassette system.

Our small band of merry men have a lot going on at the moment and whilst I am champing at the bit to get started on Muir Street this will not happen for some time but happen it will and unlike Joe who changes his mind more times than there are days in the week during a group meeting, the layout will basically remain as seen.

One thing is certain - it will be a diesel free zone but knowing Joe and Keith (the pup) I'm sure they will sneak one on behind myback and as usual this will be met with the unprintable response from yours truly.